Wisely Seeking and Seizing the Kingdom, 17th Sunday (A), July 26, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Sixth World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly
July 26, 2026
1Kings 3:5.7-12, Ps 119, Rom 8:28-30, Mt 13:44-46

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• While I was a seminarian in Rome, working as a guide to the necropolis underneath St. Peter’s Basilica where St. Peter’s tomb and bones were unearthed in the 1940s, I was asked to give a special private tour to a couple from Houston, George and Annette Strake. George’s father, George Sr., had financed the excavations. After the tour, I joined them for a meal and talked to them about what his father had told them about the excavations, which led to a general conversation about his father and how he had gotten his start. It was a gripping story that not only illustrates in a pristine form what the American dream is all about in this month of our country’s 250^th birthday, but more importantly also showcases the chief lessons Jesus is teaching us in today’s Gospel parables.
• George, Sr., was orphaned at age 7 in St. Louis. He needed to work extra hard in school to get a scholarship to study at a good university. After college, he served during World War I in the Army Air Corp and, after the war went to Mexico and Cuba to work in and learn the oil business. In 1929, the year of the great depression, he went to Houston, where his new wife Susan was from, with very little money but a big hope to fix that situation. He had learned during his time in Tampico (Mexico) and Havana the types of surface formations that increase the odds of finding oil underneath. So he began to drive up and down the back roads of East Texas in search of these formations. Most nights he would come back with a search as empty as his gas tank. He did this for almost a year, until one day, following a creek bed outside a town called Conroe, he spotted a formation like the one he had been looking for. At great risk to his young family, he sold basically all they had to buy the land. The risk paid off. Eventually two wells were struck and he became over time one of the wealthiest oilmen in Texas — and with his family great philanthropists to various good Catholic causes.
• George, Sr., made millions during the Great Depression, at a time when, obviously, so many others were struggling to survive or losing all that they had. Some might say that he was just lucky, in the right place at the right time. There’s no denying that he had did have some good fortune — for example, his being in born in the age of automobiles that he could take to survey land, his wife’s being from Houston rather than some oil-barren location, and so on — but to a large degree he made his luck by excelling in three things: first, he had a hunger for a finding a treasure that could help him not only to support his family but to help him do great good with his life; second, a recognition of what would lead to that treasure, as he scoured back road and creek beds; and third, a willingness to sacrifice all he had to obtain that treasure.
• Jesus is saying that Christians need the same three virtues in today’s twin parables of the treasure buried in a field and the pearl of great price. The parables are simple enough to understand. The first is of a poor peasant finding a buried treasure amid his work in the field. There were money changers but no real secure banks to speak of in ancient Palestine. People would often bury things of value in secret locations in fields. There was also no principle of “finders keepers, losers weepers”; whatever was discovered in a field belonged not to the discoverer but the owner because the land was essentially his bank. That’s why the peasant needed to buy the field to obtain the treasure. It’s quite obvious that the one selling had no idea that an ancient treasure was buried on his property. He didn’t place the same value in the field as much as his laborer did. For the peasant, selling all he said to get the money to buy the field was nothing compared to what he knew he would be gaining.
• The second parable is of a wealthy merchant searching for precious pearls, going from place to place in pursuit of something truly valuable and beautiful. Finally he found the pearl of his dreams, whose worth was unsurpassable, but whose owner valued it less than the money, property and the buyers’ other pearls he would get in exchange. And so the wealthy merchant sold all that he had before — doubtless houses, gems and other valuable — to obtain that pearl of great price.
• The spiritual lessons we’re called to draw from these parables parallel the virtues we see in the story of George, Sr.: first, Jesus wants us to have a burning desire, an unquenchable yearning, for the treasure of the kingdom of heaven; second, he wants us to know where we need to look to find and obtain that treasure; and third, he wants us to have the willingness to sacrifice everything to obtain that treasure. Let’s look more deeply at each of these qualities so that we might honestly see whether we have them and, if not, to ask the Lord today for the grace to have them in abundance.
• The first quality is an insatiable desire for the treasure of the kingdom of God, which is basically an unquenchable thirst for God. Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6:21). He told us in that same Sermon that many of us seek to “store up for [ourselves] treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,” but he wanted us to “store up for [ourselves] treasures in heaven,” a treasure not measured in clothing that moths can wreck, metals that rust can corrode, or money that thieves or taxes can take. Jesus is telling us that our heart must be set on God — and not just in general, but set on him more that George Sr.’s heart was set on finding oil, more than a professional athlete wants to win another championship, more than an ambitious politician seeks to win an election, and more than a man in love will do everything he can to win over and marry the woman he can’t stop thinking about. Do we have that hunger? Do we value God most of all in life or do we value other things more than God?
• In today’s first reading, God was pleased with the 18-year-old Solomon, who had just been made king after his father David’s death. God told him in a dream, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.” Solomon asked not for health or a long life. He didn’t ask for riches. He didn’t ask for victory over his father’s enemies. He hadn’t placed his treasure in any of those things. Rather, he asked, “Give your servant an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right and wrong.” He asked for the gifts of wisdom and prudence and a well-informed conscience, so that he could do the right thing and decide according to what God’s will, both personally and politically. He knew he would be surrounded by opulence not to mention courtiers trying to kiss up to him, the rich and powerful seeking advantages, and beautiful women seeking to be queen. He wanted a heart that sees and desires what God sees and desires, because there would be so many challenges for which he was unprepared and so many temptations to which he would be exposed. God replied with pleasure to his request, saying, “I will give you a heart so wise and understanding” that no one, before or after him, would be his equal.
• What would we reply if God said to us today, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you!” The response to such a question would generally show what we value most. If we were to take a poll of Americans in general or even American Catholics, how many would ask for a Porsche or a Tesla? How many would crave a winning Mega millions ticket and the material possessions it could obtain? How many would ask to become a celebrity as a singer, actor, athlete or reality show star, or to marry one? How many would ask to be younger or older, healthier, taller, smarter, more athletic or more physically attractive? In other words, how many would ask for fame, for material possessions, for power? On the other hand, how many would ask God for the grace to be holier, to be more like Him, to think like him, to be merciful like him, to be a Good Samaritan like him, to be rich in what matters most, namely, to be rich in loving communion with him? One of the most moving scenes in the history of saints is the dialogue Jesus had with St. Thomas Aquinas toward the end of his life. St. Thomas had authored many of the most sublime volumes of theology in the history of the Church and had written several of the greatest and most beautiful hymns to Jesus in the Eucharist. A few months before he died, Thomas was praying before a Crucifix and Jesus spoke to him, saying, “Bene scripsisti de me, Thoma: quam mercedem accipies?” You have written well of me, Thomas. What do you want as a reward?” St. Thomas replied, “Non aliam nisi Te, Domine!” “I want nothing but You, Lord!” He wanted nothing but God because his real treasure was God. His great desire was union with God. His great passion was to please God. Jesus wants to fill us with a hunger like St. Thomas’! He wants us to yearn for God with the zeal with which the merchant searched for pearls. That striving for God and his kingdom is the first quality God wants us to have. “Ask something of me and I will give it to you,” God tells us today. He wants us to ask for this desire for Him.
• The second quality we need is a recognition of where the treasure of the kingdom can be found. George, Sr., drove up and down the roads of East Texas and walked up and down creek beds looking for oil-bearing formations. Where are the places that will form us in the kingdom? What is the path to true union with God in his kingdom? Are we actively searching for that path or are we staying where we are in a “great depression” or our own, waiting for God and the kingdom to find us? The merchant in the parable knew the places he needed to go, and so he visited the shops, markets and seaside bazaars where pearls would be sold. The farmer wasn’t so much searching for a buried treasure, but once he discovered it in the middle of his workday tilling previous unfarmed parts of the owner’s property, he knew what to do. What about us? To grow in God’s kingdom, where do we go? And where should we go? Our task is much simpler than George, Sr.’s. We know where we find God. We find him in personal prayer, we find him in the Sacraments. We find him speaking to us in Sacred Scripture. We find him radiantly shining in the lives and writings of the saints. We find him living within us in the truly Christian moral life. We find him in cruciform, sacrificial love. We find him — as Jesus, St. Lawrence the deacon and St. Teresa of Calcutta remind us and the Church — in the loving service of our neighbor, since every time we care for someone who is hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need, Jesus tells us that we, through them, are finding and caring for him.
• In order for us to find God in those places, however, we need to grasp that each of the things I just named is a If we don’t regard prayer, the sacraments, Sacred Scripture, the writings and lives of the saints, Christian virtue, the Cross, and love of neighbor as treasures, it will be very difficult to find God there. Do we realize, for example, how great a treasure is the Sacrament of Confession, where God enriches us with the precious gift of his mercy and makes us rich in sharing it with others? Do we grasp that the commandments and the moral law God gives us are not moral straightjackets but precious jewels, such that we want to burst out with the words of today’s Responsorial Psalm, “Lord, I love your commands!?” Do we see that caring for a sick loved one, or helping a stranger, is like spiritual silver and gold? Do we regard Eucharistic Adoration as a precious gift that we’re silly not to take advantage of, more foolish than a person with a winning Mega millions lottery ticket would be not to cash it in? Are we aware that Mass is in fact the greatest earthly treasure of all, and the wisest investment of our time we could ever make? The second virtue we need is precisely to know what the treasure is and where it can be found. “Ask something of me and I will give it to you,” God tells us anew, and he wants us to ask for the gift to know where to find Him as the treasure we seek.
• The third virtue needed is the capacity to sacrifice to obtain that treasure. The rich pearl hunter and the poor hardworking peasant sold all they had to obtain the pearl and field, respectively. George, Sr., sold all he had to buy the property with the surface formations that seemed to indicate oil below. Likewise, we need to do more than hunger for the kingdom and recognize where we can find it; we also need to be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to seize it. The apostles, like St. James whose feast we celebrated yesterday, are great illustrations of those who, when finding a treasure, left all they had to follow Jesus. When the Lord Jesus called Peter, Andrew, James and John from their boats right after they had captured the largest catch in their careers, they left everything “immediately” and followed him. Likewise, when Jesus came to find St. Matthew at his tax collecting post and said, “Follow me!,” Matthew left all the money on the table, all the ledgers, and immediately got up to went with Jesus. St. Peter would later summarize the common characteristic of the apostles when he said to Jesus, “We have given up everything and followed you.” That’s in sharp contrast to the one who is famous for not having the willingness to sell all he had to obtain Jesus as the precious pearl. When the Rich Young Man came to Jesus with the question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?,” Jesus replied that he needed to keep the commandments. The young man responded that he had been keeping them perfectly since the time he was a boy; nevertheless, he said, he still knew he was missing something. Jesus replied that what he was lacking was detachment from the earthly treasures enslaving his heart. “If you wish to be perfect,” if you wish to have it all, Jesus told him, “Go, sell what you have and give the money to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then, come, follow me!” The Rich Young Man was given the chance to become perfect in Christ’s kingdom, to become wealthy in what matters most, to become the intimate friend of the King himself, but he was too addicted to his material possessions, to the things of this world, to leave them behind. He chose his stuff over Jesus and unsurprisingly “went away sad.” We need to take good note of this because there are many like the Rich Young Man today. He was a good man, a moral man, someone who kept the commandments, someone on the way to eternal life. But he was missing out on the fullness of the kingdom here on earth because he wasn’t willing to do what the merchant or the peasant did in today’s parables. He wasn’t willing to do what the apostles did. He wasn’t willing to make God the true treasure of his life and to sacrifice other pearls for the greatest one of all. Many are like him. They say their prayers each day. They come to Mass. They go to Confession. They get married in the Church. They support their parish and contribute to charity. But they’re not as happy in the faith as God wants them to be. They’re missing something, because something is holding them back; earthly treasures, big or small, have begun to own them.
• Today we all need to learn from the apostles, from George, Sr., from those who obtained the precious pearl and the hidden treasure to be willing — and wise enough! — to sacrifice the lesser for the greater, to forsake the good things of earth for God. The protagonists in the parable weren’t reluctant to sell everything they had for the treasure. They were eager to do so, because they focused not on what they were selling or losing but on what they were buying and obtaining. Likewise, for us to make the sacrifices necessary to obtain the treasure of the kingdom, we need to grasp how disproportionate what we’re gaining is from what we’re giving up. St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians, “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to consider a loss because of Christ. More than that, I even consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish [the actual word is manure], that I may gain Christ and be found in him” (Phil 3:8-9). Compared to what we gain, what we’re giving up is fit for the trash can and latrine, he says. This type of attitude toward the kingdom, toward sacrificing good things for the greatest thing of all, explains all the greatness that happens in individual lives and happens in the Church. It explains martyrdom, because the martyrs, like Father Jacques Hamel whom we remember today on the tenth anniversary of his being killed at Mass in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in France, account even their life here on earth less valuable than fidelity to God and living in his kingdom forever. It explains the lives of the saints, like Saints Joachim and Anne whom the Church celebrates today, because they’re the ones who let go of so many great worldly expectations in order to become truly rich in God and his kingdom. It explains how to suffer and to die well, because for those who really seek first God and his kingdom, death is not dreaded but desired, since even though we have to leave behind so many loved ones and good things, we recognize that all of these goods are nothing in comparison with “what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9). It explains vocations to the priesthood and to religious and consecrated life, because those who say yes to these callings indeed put God above families of their own, his love above human loves, his will above their will, his kingdom above amassing a kingdom of their own. It explains vibrant parishes, because it’s in those parishes that people sacrifice huge amounts of their time, money, and expertise to build them and help them grow. It explains truly joyful homes, monasteries, convents and rectories, which arise from situations where family members and spiritual siblings willingly and repeatedly sacrifice to make others happy, to do things not because they have to but because they choose to out of love for others, instead of just being a type of dormitory where perhaps a few sacrifice but most just prioritize their self-centered aims. “Ask something of me and I will give it to you,” God says to us today. And he wants us to ask for the capacity truly to love him to the point of giving our life joyfully for him who took on our humanity to give his life for ours. To live up to our vocation to be saints, we must be willing to sacrifice everything else for God.
• What if we haven’t lived this way until now? What if we recognize that we haven’t sought God and his kingdom as we should have, or haven’t recognized sufficiently all those places God has given us to find that treasure, or haven’t sacrificed enough to obtain it, or all of the above? St. Paul’s words in today’s second reading are a great consolation. He reminds us, “All things work out for the good for those who love God.” Even the Cross, even persecutions, even a terrible diagnosis and physical suffering, even our past sins, can all become fertilizer for new spiritual growth — provided that we bring them to God, let him transform them, and learn from these experiences. All our past mistakes and worldly priorities can “work out for the good” — ours and others’ — if today we respond to Jesus’ message and the graces extended to us and begin to live by the truth of these parables. Today God the Father asks us, like he asks Solomon, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you,” and today we ask for the grace to do what the Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph, what Saints Joachim and Anne, the apostles, so many saints and Father Jacques Hamel have done: to seek the kingdom, to place it first, and sacrifice everything for it, uniting all we have and are to what God wants to do in us. We can in fact become incredibly wealthy in what matters most if we put into practice what Jesus teaches us today.
• One last consideration. Today is the sixth World Day of Grandparents and the Elderly, established in 2021 by Pope Francis not only to celebrate the gift of grandparents and the elderly, not just to prioritize and pray for them, whether living still with us or living in the Lord, but to treasure them and to profit, hopefully, from their wisdom. As human beings get older, they are supposed to be becoming wiser, thanks to the experience of years. For Christians it’s especially so, if we are deepening our personal knowledge of God and awareness of his ways. The Lord wants us over time to become more and more like the head of the household in the third parable today who is able to draw from his storeroom both old and new: the experience of decades long past with the creativity that flows from living with God in the present. As we age, we should be wiser than the 18-year-old Solomon in treasuring God’s wisdom and ways and tasting the fruits of decades of walking with the Lord in his ways. Today we ask God to bless those who are grandparents and seniors even more with the gift of wisdom so that they may be examples to us all of what we see in the figures of Simeon and Anna at the Presentation of the Temple: those who use their advanced years to grow in desire for God, to advance in docility to the Holy Spirit, to give the gift of whatever time they have left to prioritize God, and then to rejoice when at least their eyes see in Christ God’s salvation and glory.
• As Catholics get older, it’s a joy to see so many begin to prioritize what matters most, and it’s not surprising that many become daily Mass-goers, because the best place to make that choice for the Kingdom is here at Mass. St. John Vianney, the patron saints of priests, catechized his people about the power of the Eucharist to make us great saints, to help us seize the kingdom, if we but choose to center our whole life on Jesus, the King himself, in the Eucharist. He said, “Next to this sacrament, we are like someone who dies of thirst next to a river, just needing to bend the head down to drink; or like a poor man next to a treasure chest, when all that is needed is to stretch out the hand” and grab the gold coins. The Eucharist is that treasure that quenches our thirst and makes us truly rich, because Christ himself is the incarnate pearl of great price. Let’s ask God the Father for the grace to make his Son here in the Eucharist our true treasure, so that we may experience in this life and forever in heaven the joy Jesus describes of the poor peasant and rich merchant, the joy we see in Saints Joachim and Anne at the conception of Mary, of Saints Simeon and Anna discovering the baby Jesus in the temple. That joy, that treasure, that salvation and glory, that Savior, is ours for the asking. This is what Jesus is offering us today: the admirabile commercium of an eternal lifetime. Let’s follow the saints in giving our whole life in exchange for this gift.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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